Chiral Shock Waves

We study the shock waves in relativistic chiral matter. We argue that the conventional Rankine-Hugoinot relations are modified due to the presence of chiral transport phenomena. We show that the entropy discontinuity in a weak shock wave is quadratic in the pressure discontinuity when the effect of chiral transport becomes sufficiently large. We also show that rarefaction shock waves, which do not exist in usual nonchiral fluids, can appear in chiral matter. The direction of shock wave propagation in a vorticity is found to be completely determined by the direction of the vorticity and the chirality of fermions. These features are exemplified by shock propagation in dense neutrino matter in the hydrodynamic regime.Comment: 5 pages; v3: published versio

Chiral Anomalous Dispersion

The linearized Einstein equation describing graviton propagation through a chiral medium appears to be helicity dependent. We analyze features of the corresponding spectrum in a collision-less regime above a flat background. In the long wave-length limit, circularly polarized metric perturbations travel with a helicity dependent group velocity that can turn negative giving rise to a new type of an anomalous dispersion. We further show that this chiral anomalous dispersion is a general feature of polarized modes propagating through chiral plasmas extending our result to the electromagnetic sector.Comment: 13 pages

Chiral fermions on lattice axion strings

I discretize axion string configuration coupled to a Dirac fermion, which in the continuum binds a massless chiral fermion in its core when the winding is one. I show that such a configuration can host one or more chiral fermions when regulated on the lattice. Realization of these chiral fermions relies on the presence of Wilson-like terms similar to the Wilson term used in lattice domain wall fermions. The number of chiral fermions on the string jumps as the Wilson-like parameter is varied with respect to the other mass scales in the problem. These jumps coincide with phase transitions along a two dimensional surface passing through the string's core. A one-loop Feynman diagram is used to demonstrate how anomaly inflow works in this lattice regularized theory.Comment: Typo corrected, new references added and style files change